Download or read book CAHOKIA CHIEFDOM written by MILNER GEORGE R and published by Smithsonian Books (DC). This book was released on 1998-10-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on his own extensive surveys and excavations, and on a wide array of research that has been conducted in the central Mississippi Valley during the past several decades, Milner argues that, while clearly impressive for its time, Cahokia-area society differed little in its basic organization from the smaller, less complex chiefdoms that dotted the southern Eastern Woodlands.
Download or read book CAHOKIA CHIEFDOM written by MILNER GEORGE R and published by Smithsonian. This book was released on 1998-10-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encompassing more than 100 earthen mounds that were constructed during the eleventh through fourteenth centuries, Cahokia is the centerpiece of an area east of St. Louis uncommonly rich in archaeological sites. Because the mounds at Cahokia are more numerous than at any other Mississippian period site in North America, scholars have long believed that they were constructed by a populous, politically centralized, economically differentiated society supported by a vast hinterland. Drawing on his own extensive surveys and excavations, and on a wide array of research that has been conducted in the central Mississippi Valley during the past several decades, George R. Milner argues that, while clearly impressive for its time, Cahokia-area society differed little in its basic organization from the smaller, less complex chiefdoms that dotted the southern Eastern Woodlands. He demonstrates that the many mounds, the focus of so much archaeological attention, could have been constructed with the labor of far fewer people than previously supposed. In The Cabokia Chiefdom, Milner provides a comprehensive view of a chiefdom that, despite its impressive architecture, was not nearly as densely settled or complex as conventional wisdom would have us believe.
Download or read book Cahokia written by Timothy R. Pauketat and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About one thousand years ago, Native Americans built hundreds of earthen platform mounds, plazas, residential areas, and other types of monuments in the vicinity of present-day St. Louis. This sprawling complex, known to archaeologists as Cahokia, was the dominant cultural, ceremonial, and trade center north of Mexico for centuries. This stimulating collection of essays casts new light on the remarkable accomplishments of Cahokia.
Download or read book Chiefdoms Collapse and Coalescence in the Early American South written by Robin Beck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a new framework for understanding the transformation of the Native American South during the first centuries of the colonial era.
Download or read book Mound Sites of the Ancient South written by Eric E. Bowne and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From approximately AD 900 to 1600, ancient Mississippian culture dominated today’s southeastern United States. These Native American societies, known more popularly as moundbuilders, had populations that numbered in the thousands, produced vast surpluses of food, engaged in longdistance trading, and were ruled by powerful leaders who raised large armies. Mississippian chiefdoms built fortified towns with massive earthen structures used as astrological monuments and burial grounds. The remnants of these cities—scattered throughout the Southeast from Florida north to Wisconsin and as far west as Texas—are still visible and awe-inspiring today. This heavily illustrated guide brings these settlements to life with maps, artists’ reconstructions, photos of artifacts, and historic and modern photos of sites, connecting our archaeological knowledge with what is visible when visiting the sites today. Anthropologist Eric E. Bowne discusses specific structures at each location and highlights noteworthy museums, artifacts, and cultural features. He also provides an introduction to Mississippian culture, offering background on subsistence and settlement practices, political and social organization, warfare, and belief systems that will help readers better understand these complex and remarkable places. Sites include Cahokia, Moundville, Etowah, and many more.
Download or read book Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions written by Timothy R. Pauketat and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2007-05-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades anthropology, especially ethnography, has supplied the prevailing models of how human beings have constructed, and been constructed by, their social arrangements. In turn, archaeologists have all too often relied on these models to reconstruct the lives of ancient peoples. In lively, engaging, and informed prose, Timothy Pauketat debunks much of this social-evolutionary theorizing about human development, as he ponders the evidence of 'chiefdoms' left behind by the Mississippian culture of the American southern heartland. This book challenges all students of history and prehistory to reexamine the actual evidence that archaeology has made available, and to do so with an open mind.
Download or read book Cahokia written by Timothy R. Pauketat and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About one thousand years ago, Native Americans built hundreds of earthen platform mounds, plazas, residential areas, and other types of monuments in the vicinity of present-day St. Louis. This sprawling complex, known to archaeologists as Cahokia, was the dominant cultural, ceremonial, and trade center north of Mexico for centuries. This stimulating collection of essays casts new light on the remarkable accomplishment of Cahokia. The nine contributors explore a wide range of topics - religion, trade, the nature of local and regional ideologies, social organization, subsistence, mound construction, and the longstanding question of Cahokia's relationship to later Mississippian chiefdoms across the Southeast.
Download or read book Segmented and Ascendant Chiefdom Polity as Viewed from the Divers Site written by Glen A. Freimuth and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study contributes to our understanding of the nature of political control exerted by the Mississippian Cahokia polity over small rural villages in the southern American Bottom. Currently two models, which I call the Segmented and Ascendant Chiefdoms, respectively, provide contrasting explanations of the nature and amount of Cahokia control over rural villages. I examine the fit of these models against archaeological data from the Divers and other regional sites. The analyses range over several main topics, including populations, labor requirements, nonlocal artifacts, provisioning, and rituals. I find that the archaeological patterns expressed at the Divers site best fit a Segmented Chiefdom model wherein political control is decentralized and rural villages retain a high degree of political autonomy. Cahokia, as the American Bottom0́9s main Mississippian town, has the largest population, physical size, elite status items, and monumental construction which I describe as material domination and political dominance. Political dominance requires manipulation of local leaders and their followers for political and social control and this manipulation was expressed through ritual materials and rituals performed at Cahokia and other mound towns. The Cahokia elite created new rituals and associated material expressions through collective action and attempted to gain control of existing commoner ritual performances and symbols but these and political autonomy largely remained with the commoners who occupied small villages like Divers.
Download or read book Etowah written by Adam King and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This a reconstruction of the waxing and waning of political fortunes among the chiefly elites at an important centre of the prehistoric world.
Download or read book Cahokia the Great Native American Metropolis written by Biloine W. Young and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five centuries before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, indigenous North Americans had already built a vast urban center on the banks of the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. This is the story of North America's largest archaeological site, told through the lives, personalities, and conflicts of the men and women who excavated and studied it. At its height the metropolis of Cahokia had twenty thousand inhabitants in the city center with another ten thousand in the outskirts. Cahokia was a precisely planned community with a fortified central city and surrounding suburbs. Its entire plan reflected the Cahokian's concept of the cosmos. Its centerpiece, Monk's Mound, ten stories tall, is the largest pre-Columbian structure in North America, with a base circumference larger than that of either the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt or the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico. Nineteenth-century observers maintained that the mounds, too sophisticated for primitive Native American cultures, had to have been created by a superior, non-Indian race, perhaps even by survivors of the lost continent of Atlantis. Melvin Fowler, the "dean" of Cahokia archaeologists, and Biloine Whiting Young tell an engrossing story of the struggle to protect the site from the encroachment of interstate highways and urban sprawl. Now identified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and protected by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Cahokia serves as a reminder that the indigenous North Americans had a past of complexity and great achievement.
Download or read book Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions written by Timothy R. Pauketat and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2007 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sweeps away the last vestiges of social-evolutionary explanations of 'chiefdoms' by rethinking the history of Pre-Columbian Southeast peoples and comparing them to ancient peoples in the Southwest, Mexico, Mesoamerica, and Mesopotamia.
Download or read book Mississippian Communities and Households written by J. Daniel Rogers and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1995-11-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Mississippian period (approximately A.D. 1000-1600) in the midwestern and southeastern United States a variety of greater and lesser chiefdoms took shape. Archaeologists have for many years explored the nature of these chiefdoms from the perspective common in archaeological investigations—from the top down, investigating ceremonial elite mound structures and predicting the basic domestic unit from that data. Because of the increased number of field investigations at the community level in recent years, this volume is able to move the scale of investigation down to the level of community and household, and it contributes to major revisions of settlement hierarchy concepts.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology written by William F. Keegan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together examples of the best research to address the complexity of the Caribbean past.
Download or read book The Savannah River Chiefdoms written by David G. Anderson and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1994-11-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores political change in chiefdoms, specifically how complex chiefdoms emerge and collapse, and how this process—called cycling—can be examined using archaeological, ethnohistoric, paleoclimatic, paleosubsistence, and physical anthropological data. The focus for the research is the prehistoric and initial contact-era Mississippian chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States, specifically the societies occupying the Savannah River basin from ca. A.D. 1000 to 1600. This regional focus and the multidisciplinary nature of the investigation provide a solid introduction to the Southeastern Mississippian archaeological record and the study of cultural evolution in general.
Download or read book From Cahokia to Larson to Moundville written by A. Martin Byers and published by Univ Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The orthodox view of the Mississippian social world hinges on the ideas that chiefdoms--dominance based hierarchical societies in the Eastern Woodlands of North America--vied for power, often violently bit at times cooperatively, through political and economic avenues. These chiefdoms represented something of a feudal state in prehistoric North America, which lasted up to the contact period with Europeans around 1500 A.D. In From Cahokia to Larson to Moundville, noted archaeologist A. Martin Byers challenges these assumptions and offers a contrasting view by deconstructing the chiefdom model and offering instead an autonomous social world that focused on spiritual renewal and sacred rituals. Byers presents his case through the archaeological record of Cahokia, Larson, and Moundville's monumental earthworks and, in doing so, reveals the Mississippian social community to be more complex, and more cooperative, than previously envisioned. A. Martin Byers, now retired, was a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal.
Download or read book From Chicaza to Chickasaw written by Robbie Ethridge and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping regional history, anthropologist Robbie Ethridge traces the metamorphosis of the Native South from first contact in 1540 to the dawn of the eighteenth century, when indigenous people no longer lived in a purely Indian world but rather on the edge of an expanding European empire. Using a framework that Ethridge calls the "Mississippian shatter zone" to explicate these tumultuous times, From Chicaza to Chickasaw examines the European invasion, the collapse of the precontact Mississippian world, and the restructuring of discrete chiefdoms into coalescent Native societies in a colonial world. The story of one group--the Chickasaws--is closely followed through this period.
Download or read book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms written by F. Kent Reilly and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between AD 900-1600, the native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States conceived and executed one of the greatest artistic traditions of the Precolumbian Americas. Created in the media of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood, and incised or carved with a complex set of symbols and motifs, this seven-hundred-year-old artistic tradition functioned within a multiethnic landscape centered on communities dominated by earthen mounds and plazas. Previous researchers have referred to this material as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC). This groundbreaking volume brings together ten essays by leading anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians, who analyze the iconography of Mississippian art in order to reconstruct the ritual activities, cosmological vision, and ideology of these ancient precursors to several groups of contemporary Native Americans. Significantly, the authors correlate archaeological, ethnographic, and art historical data that illustrate the stylistic differences within Mississippian art as well as the numerous changes that occur through time. The research also demonstrates the inadequacy of the SECC label, since Mississippian art is not limited to the Southeast and reflects stylistic changes over time among several linked but distinct religious traditions. The term Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS) more adequately describes the corpus of this Mississippian art. Most important, the authors illustrate the overarching nature of the ancient Native American religious system, as a creation unique to the native American cultures of the eastern United States.
